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Contributing to Catstodon
Thank you for your interest in contributing to a fork of the glitch-soc project!
Before you do anything here, please check if you can contribute to either the vanilla Mastodon project or glitch-soc first.
If you still decide to contribute here instead, here are some guidelines, and ways you can help.
(This document is a bit of a work-in-progress, so please bear with us. If you don't see what you're looking for here, please don't hesitate to reach out!)
Translations
You can submit glitch-soc-specific translations via Crowdin. They are periodically merged into the codebase.
Planning
Right now a lot of the planning for this project takes place... in my head. Actually, just contact me via Matrix - contact info can be found on my personal website. You can also contribute via GitHub or kescherGit, if you have an account at either.
Documentation
Unlike glitch-soc, which has glitch-soc/docs (online at glitch-soc.github.io/docs/), this repo only documents things in a README. Sorry.
Right now, we've mostly focused on the features that make this fork different from upstream, which, may I remind you, is already a fork.
Frontend Development
Check out the documentation here for more information on this topic. We'll be following that a bit.
Backend Development
See the guidelines below.
You should also try to follow the guidelines set out in the original CONTRIBUTING.md from mastodon/mastodon, reproduced below.
Contributing
Thank you for considering contributing to Mastodon 🐘
You can contribute in the following ways:
- Finding and reporting bugs
- Translating the Mastodon interface into various languages
- Contributing code to Mastodon by fixing bugs or implementing features
- Improving the documentation
Please review the org-level contribution guidelines for high-level acceptance criteria guidance and the DEVELOPMENT guide for environment-specific details.
API Changes and Additions
Any changes or additions made to the API should have an accompanying pull request on our documentation repository.
Bug Reports
Bug reports and feature suggestions must use descriptive and concise titles and be submitted to GitHub Issues. Please use the search function to make sure there are not duplicate bug reports or feature requests.
Security Issues
If you believe you have identified a security issue in Mastodon or our own apps, check SECURITY.
Translations
Translations are community contributed via Crowdin. They are periodically reviewed and merged into the codebase.
Pull Requests
Size and Scope
Our time is limited and PRs making large, unsolicited changes are unlikely to get a response. Changes which link to an existing confirmed issue, or which come from a "help wanted" issue or other request are more likely to be reviewed.
The smaller and more narrowly focused the changes in a PR are, the easier they are to review and potentially merge. If the change only makes sense in some larger context of future ongoing work, note that in the description, but still aim to keep each distinct PR to a "smallest viable change" chunk of work.
Description of Changes
Unless the Pull Request is about refactoring code, updating dependencies or other internal tasks, assume that the audience are not developers, but a Mastodon user or server admin, and try to describe it from their perspective.
The final commit in the main branch will carry the title from the PR. The main branch is then fed into the changelog and ultimately into release notes. We try to follow the keepachangelog spec, and while that does not prescribe how exactly the entries ought to be named, starting titles using one of the verbs "Add", "Change", "Deprecate", "Remove", or "Fix" (present tense) is helpful.
Example:
Not ideal Better Fixed NoMethodError in RemovalWorker Fix nil error when removing statuses caused by race condition Technical Requirements
Pull requests that do not pass automated checks on CI may not be reviewed. In particular, please keep in mind:
- Unit and integration tests (rspec, vitest)
- Code style rules (rubocop, eslint)
- Normalization of locale files (i18n-tasks)
- Relevant accessibility or performance concerns
Documentation
The Mastodon documentation is a statically generated site that contains guides and API docs. Improvements are made via PRs to the documentation repository.
